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Justice and the Difference Principle1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Copp
David Copp*
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
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Extract

In his book, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls suggests that a theory of social justice is satisfactory only if it has both of two characteristics (pp. 182, 6). First, it must be capable of serving as the “public moral basis of society” (p. 182). That is, it must be reasonable to suppose that it would be strictly complied with while serving as the public conception of justice in a society which is in favourable circumstances—a society in which the people would strictly comply with any public conception of justice if the strains of commitment to it were not too great, given the general facts of psychology and moral learning (p. 145, cf. pp. 8, 175-83, 245-6). Second, a theory of justice must characterize “ … our considered judgements in reflective equilibrium” (p. 182).

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , December 1974 , pp. 229 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1974

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Professor David Lyons, the members of his seminar at Cornell University in the spring of 1972 and Professor Richard Miller for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

References

2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1971.) All page references in the text are references to this book.

3 Rawls takes his theory also to provide standards for guiding social change (pp. 263, 246). Obviously these two aspects of the theory are closely related. A theory of justice intended to guide social change would be incomplete if it did not include a theory providing standards for assessing the justice of the outcomes and starting points of instances of change. And a theory which provided standards for assessing this could guide change by indicating where considerations of justice required change to start and where to stop. However, I will not discuss social change except in so far as I find it necessary to an assessment of how well Rawls’ theory characterizes our considered judgments concerning the justice of the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society.

4 Here, as throughout the paper, I assume that the society concerned is in such favourable conditions that the special conception of justice applies, and in discussing that conception, I ignore the restriction concerning the just savings principle.

5 This is a simplification which is, nevertheless, accurate if the society in question is only considered to have two relevant representatives (cf. pp. 82f.). It is a simplification which Rawls uses.

6 Rawls says that inequalities are to be judged in terms of the long-run expectations of the least-advantaged (pp. 44, 285). However, if we considered only long-run expectations in applying the difference principle, so that we considered the effects of changes in the basic structure on only the long-run expectations of the worst-off, we would get results which Rawls could not countenance. We would have similarly undesirable results if we considered the effects of changes in the basic structure on only the short-run expectations of the worst-off. The problems arise in part because of the possibility that a change in the basic structure should have beneficial effects on the expectations of a representative man in the short-run, but detrimental effects in the long-run, or vice versa. This could be shown, but the argument is long and involved. In applying the difference principle, then, we must balance the short-run against the long-run effects of changes in the basic structure on the expectations of representative men.

7 On the model of this case, we can also construct a counter-example to Rawls’ claim that if the basic structure of a society guarantees equal liberty for all and fair equality of opportunity, then the distribution of economic and social benefits in the society is just if the expectations of the least-advantaged representative are maximized. Imagine again a society in which the expectations of the better-off representative greatly exceed those of the least-advantaged representative. Now suppose that if the existing distribution of benefits were changed in any way, the better-off members of the society would rebel, destroying the society's productive capacity for the present and the foreseeable future. They would rebel because of their belief that the existing distribution is divinely required. God demands that the society be destroyed if the distribution is ever changed. Under this supposition, the, expectations of the least-advantaged are maximized in this society, and assuming that the society's basic structure guarantees equal liberty for all and fair equality of opportunity, it follows that the basic structure of the society is just. But this result of Rawls’ theory conflicts with our considered judgments in ways similar to those already discussed.

8 Professor Lyons suggested that the difficulty underlying this example is the faultiness of Rawls’ analysis of the relevant notion of a social contribution.